


Dreamweave

by ellorgast



Series: Monster Socks! [1]
Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Canon - Manga, Friendship, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 13:15:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2310920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ellorgast/pseuds/ellorgast
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody has nightmares, even Earth's guardians.  Sometimes, Mamoru has the power to make those nightmares go away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreamweave

**Author's Note:**

> This fanfic is now available [as a podfic](http://transmissionsfromthemoon.tumblr.com/post/165205051706/dreamweave-by-ellorgast-narrated-by), beautifully narrated by [smokingbomber](http://archiveofourown.org/users/smokingbomber)! Go ahead and follow the link if you would prefer to hear it as an audio story. Please check out [Transmissions from the Moon](http://transmissionsfromthemoon.tumblr.com/) for other wonderful podfics!

_There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors. - Jim Morrison_

 

It was late into the night, when Mamoru woke from a nightmare that was not his own.

It was not the first time. Just as he felt their thoughts and emotions in the day, when they slept, he felt every nightmare that his Shitennou endured. 

What he usually did, on nights like this, was wait. He could not take away their pasts or the things they had seen. He sometimes tried to wake them, but that was so much worse. Asleep, they could at least hope to forget the dream again before morning, but when they were woken, the nightmares latched on like parasites and followed them to the waking world, and his heart clenched in his chest every time he had to see the wild look of fear in their eyes. 

But tonight, it was all of them. Whether from the darkness of the new moon or the sharpening winter chill in the air, their choice of takeout for dinner or tonight's action film cutting too close to reality, all of them were locked in their own personal horrors tonight. He could feel the nightmares, like shapeless beasts of darkness, invading their minds and their bedrooms.

It was to be expected, wasn't it, that the bravest warriors of this world would also suffer the worst night terrors. With all that they had experienced, the fall of two kingdoms--one good and one terrible--it was only human, in both weakness and in virtue, that their nights were sometimes haunted. That very humanity was what he so loved in them.

But it did not mean he had to leave them to suffer.

Mamoru swung his feet out of bed, too intent on his mission to consider throwing on a shirt to go with his flannel pants. He could heal many things, he thought. Physical wounds were the most obvious, but there were thoughts, and emotions. There were memories. 

And if he could do it in the day, there was no reason why he could not do it at night. For once, he was going to do something for them. Thus did Chiba Mamoru get it into his head that he was going to fix every nightmare in this house, tonight. And he would do it without waking a soul.

He opened his door carefully, and peered out into the dark hallway. The difficulty, of course, was getting near enough to his Shitennou to do any good. Certainly, he could have sat in his own room and radiated Happy Golden Crystal Vibes in their general direction, but he imagined that he would be well out of crystal juice before any of it made it past his walls. 

No, he would just have to visit them each to give them their daily dose of Mamoru Magic. 

The wood floor was cool on his bare feet as he silently padded into the hall. Before him, a row of doors stood sentry, silently denying him access. In the utter silence of the household, he was certain that every rattle and click of the handles would ring as loud as church bells in the ears of his guardians. The idea of slipping through those doors undetected suddenly seemed an unfathomable feat.

If he were Kunzite, he could have melted into the shadows, become darkness within darkness, carnal and silent. 

If he were Zoisite, he could have induced the deepest sleep over the household with the most haunting of lullabies.

If he were Jadeite, he could have teleported from one room to the next, as casually and imperceptibly as a cat.

If he were Nephrite, well. Caution be damned, there was surely no problem in the world that could not be saved by loud music and late-night pizza.

But he was none of his men, and while he had a damn shiny crystal that could destroy monsters and heal wounds and build empires, it could do nothing whatsoever to help him get through those doors. He stared at the one immediately across from him. Tacked up on the dark wood was a small page ripped from an artist's sketchbook, the edges of the page still jagged and uneven. The acrylic shades of yellows and oranges and unexpected streaks of green were so vibrant that they almost glowed even in the dark hall, and their shape curled gracefully into the faint suggestion of a bird. The abrupt "Z" in pencil was the only signature, because Sasha liked to be enigmatic like that. He thought it made him seem more sophisticated.

With a cautious step forward, Mamoru placed his hand on the door. Through the thickly-knitted grain of wood, he could feel Sasha's presence, a warm hum of flame and flowers and music. But beneath that was something more sinister, a sort of fire that burned hot and torturous, that lived to consume, that roared with oily black smoke made to poison and choke. The sensation became so strong that Mamoru nearly expected to look down and see real smoke pluming from beneath the door, but the fire was not a physical one, and there was nothing to see. 

He had to get in there. He was not going to let 34 millimeters of plywood stand in the way of ending this nightmare. He may not have had his guardians' abilities, but it was not for nothing that Tuxedo Kamen had begun his evil-fighting career as a jewelry thief. If magic was not going to help him, then he would just have to ninja his way in.

He leaned on the door knob, pressing his body to the door to help muffle the noise. The metal clicked dully at the pressure, causing his breath to catch. He wrapped one hand around the door knob's neck, hoping this would further absorb any sound. Then carefully, so carefully, he began to turn it. He thought he could feel every spring coil and every hiss of metal sliding against metal. The slow rotation of his hand had never felt like such a long, torturous journey. There was another low click, and suddenly the knob could no longer turn. He took a breath. He shifted his weight. Slowly, so slowly, he began to push.

There was a moment of panic, when the door seemed to stick, and the imagined terror of overcompensating, pushing too hard, and sending himself flying right into Sasha's room as the door unjammed itself, made his heart drum so loud the he imagined the whole house could hear it. But it was only a moment, and the door obeyed, swinging open as easily and silently as any well-oiled machine. It was not until he could see the yawning darkness of the room that he allowed himself to admit victory, and though the house remained utterly silent, in his head there were football stadiums chanting his name in triumph. 

This just in: Mamoru Chiba can open doors.

The heat that struck his face the moment he entered was stifling, and it had nothing to do with the thermostat. Mamoru forced himself to ignore it long enough to turn and swing the door back into place, stopping just short of letting it touch the frame. By the time he had done this, he was already perspiring, even with no shirt on.

The reason for this was because Sasha was radiating such heat that he expected the air over him to ripple with it. Through what little light the window offered, he could see only the faint outline of a lump where Sasha's bed should have been. He crept nearer. His feet were beginning to sweat, and they produced a sticky ripping sound every time he lifted them. Mamoru began moving on his tiptoes to minimize the noise. There was no need, really, because now that he was in Sasha's room, every small noise he made was drowned out by frantic, gasping breaths. It was fortunate that Mamoru swallowed the urge to run to him right then, because at that moment he nearly stumbled right off his feet when floor abruptly gave way to a mound of something thick and soft, and the results would likely have been disastrous at a run.

The mound, of course, was a thick down comforter, which spilled in a tangle from the foot of Sasha's bed to the floor. Sasha despised being cold, and slept with an obscene amount of bedding, every layer of which he had kicked off of himself in the night. The effect was a massive blanket nest that seemed to double the bed's original size. Mamoru scaled the mountains of blankets at his bedside, finally drawing close enough to see Sasha himself. True to his hatred of cold, Sasha had made the mistake of sleeping in the thickest hoodie on the planet (one which was also oversized and probably stolen off of Neil). He was writhing feverishly within its choking grasp, and even beneath the dim street light filtered through the curtains, sweat glistened on his face. 

Mamoru hesitated only a moment, before sliding his fingertips over Sasha's forehead, to push aside the long curls of hair that were soaked and matted to his face. No normal human body should have been able to produce as much heat as Sasha was. It was like touching a furnace.

There was always fire simmering beneath his skin, but it was different from the flame that burned within Rei. The fire of Mars was holy and purifying. It licked the impurities from your very bones when it passed over you. That was what made it so terrible and deadly. The fire within Zoisite was a life-giving fire. The fire of their sun.

But now it raged as tumultuously as the sun had on the day that Metallia broke from its fiery grip, and Mamoru wondered that Sasha's sheets had not yet spontaneously combusted. Was it irony, or merely appropriate, that the man who controlled fire would be haunted by nightmares of that very fire consuming him? When he touched Sasha, Mamoru could almost hear the flames roaring in his own ears, and he had to resist the urge to glance up at the ceiling, to see whether the house was ablaze. 

Instead, he laid his palm over the young guardian's forehead, and concentrated power and stilling thoughts through it.

Psychometry was not the most reliable or predictable of powers. There was a reason that, at a young age, Mamoru had learned to keep his hands to himself. Sometimes it awoke unbidden, sometimes it ignored his calls like a rebellious child, and sometimes, it behaved in decidedly unexpected ways. He did not know what to expect when he tried to silence Sasha's dream, least of all that the dream itself would fight back. But as soon as Mamoru's power began to flow through his fingertips, he was met with the acrid stench of smoke choking his lungs, and that roar he had heard, only a suggestion to his ears before, now reached a deafening pitch. Nightmares lived to trap you in their grasp. This one wanted two to feed on.

It took every ounce of control Mamoru had not to grab Sasha and bolt for the window. Every instinct in his body was at odds with the knowledge that he was not trapped in the center of a raging inferno. There was no ignoring the feel of the sparks searing his skin, the flames licking at his heels. When he closed his eyes, a world of white and orange heat nearly blinded him, and he forced them open again. 

On Sasha's desk was the sharp outline of a paper crane. When it caught his eye, it became all that Mamoru could focus on. Sasha was always making his little paper doodads, and leaving them around the house to be found weeks later, a tiny paper invasion of forest creatures. It was Sasha he was here for, not the heat and fear that raged around him. He stared at the crane, made it fill his vision. There was nothing else. Nothing but the crane, and Sasha.

When he had almost begun to believe himself, so did the nightmare. The sound died first, then the heat. The fire spluttered, shrank in upon itself, cooled. Soon Mamoru found himself standing, as before, in a dark, silent room, a faint scent of smoke in the air. 

Below him, Sasha breathed a deep sigh and rolled over. The sweat still streaked his face, but he had already cooled beneath Mamoru's fingers, and the fire inside him had settled to the gentle stir of glowing embers. Mamoru unbunched the sheets that were tangled at Sasha's feet and pulled them up to his chest. He picked one of the less heavy blankets from the pile on the floor and did the same with that, knowing that Sasha would hate to wake up cold.

He took every bit as much care in exiting Sasha's bedroom as he had in entering it, and once Mamoru found himself again in the hall, the door closed, and the sweat turning to ice on his back, he felt as if the entire ordeal had taken him hours. One down, three to go.

Jaden had a bulletin board mounted on his door, because this suited his ADHD needs very well. The board changed as frequently as his clothes (or possibly with higher frequency, since he hated to do laundry). At the moment, it was old postcards found for 5 yen, tickets to games and movies he had recently seen, an overexposed Polaroid of Neil grinning stupidly, a couple business cards, and a drawing of a cock. If he were so inclined, he could have wasted the rest of his night trying to guess at which of the four males he shared the house with had been responsible for the cock, but they appeared with such frequency that he barely gave it notice.

He had underestimated Jaden's ability to be a complete slob. The moment the door swung open, Mamoru was met with a vast elephant graveyard of accumulated trinkets, a veritable minefield that stood between himself and his guardian. He hovered in the doorway, hoping to find some discernible path through the room, but Jaden was not one to be so predictable. Nothing to do but to tiptoe carefully through the darkness, and hope for the best.

It went well, for the most part. He managed not to trip over the books or the guitar, he narrowly avoided crushing Jaden's TI-83, the stack of Legos lay undisturbed, the disembodied bicycle wheel was overcome, along with the many tiny allen wrenches, and the B-26 Marauder model airplane was not woefully smashed into a million pieces. He did, however, crush every toe on his left foot against the steel teeth of a bicycle crankset, an incident which was cause for much silent screaming in paralyzed pain as Jaden slept on, oblivious. The only thing that kept Mamoru from resentfully waking up the guardian right then was the sharp hiss of breath drawn through clenched teeth.

Jaden was curled up, hedgehog-style, into the tiniest defensive ball that he could make himself. The light from the window dimly outlined the way that his shoulder muscles coiled and bunched beneath his tank top. His knees were gathered nearly up to his chin, his arms crossed protectively over his chest. Mamoru could see his left hand grasping his right biceps, and with the way the knuckles clenched, he wondered whether Jaden's nails were not cutting right through the skin. Jaden's entire body was such a tightly-wound spring that some part of Mamoru feared that the slightest touch would cause him to snap.

Mamoru could have brushed the curly bangs from Jaden's knitted forehead as he had with Sasha, but such an intimate movement could have been interpreted in his dream as a threat. He debated for a few moments before clasping his hand over Jaden's, the knuckles sharp and ridged beneath Mamoru's fingers, twitching slightly like the paws of a dog who dreamed of hunting. He imagined that, whatever Jaden was hunting in his sleep, it was probably not bunnies.

He concentrated, as he had with Sasha, on letting his power flow through his fingers into Jaden's. The first sensation that met him nearly made him retch: the sharp metallic taste of steel and blood, invading the back of his throat. He smelled it, too, but the smells were accompanied by those of mud, sweat, and decay. 

The sound was the most horrible. Over the drumming of heavy rain and the rumble of thunder, the hiss and squeal of metal striking metal, the furious war-cries, there were screams.

Mamoru had seen many battles in this life, most of them terrible experiences that he would wish on no one. But few of them, if any, matched the mindless horror of the wars of his old life, and for once, he counted himself fortunate not to be among the few who remembered them.

All he wanted to do was put his arms around his guardian and protect him, use himself as a shield from the terror unfolding around him. But there were no physical swords to throw himself in the way of, and no matter how vividly Mamoru himself was beginning to feel the driving rain dripping into his eyes, the squelching mud, and the hot blood sliding down his ice cold skin, the horrors did not exist anywhere outside of Jaden himself. 

Though Mercury commanded the waters in all its three forms and Jupiter was the lady of the storms, the rain--the very movement of water--belonged to Jadeite. The running streams that snaked over terrain like a dragon's tail, the raging cataracts, the breaking surf crashing against the borders of this tiny island country, the currents that flowed deep within Neptune's domain, and the minute droplets descending from the heavens. Just as the water never ceased flowing, Jaden never stopped moving. Putting him and Makoto in the same room before a thunder storm was a recipe for catastrophe. Mamoru had never seen so many electrical burns.

The feel of the storm only escalated when he tried to calm it, as though the battle and the storm were all one and the same, the clashing weapons and thundering rain, the unbridled power and fury of it all. Mamoru remembered Sasha's origami, and how it had grounded him. In Jaden's room--in his life, even--where he had drifted from one hobby to another as easily as slipping into new personae, there were dozens of objects to represent him, but it was on the guitar that his gaze settled. It had been the first major purchase that Jaden made after he returned to this world, and he had, miraculously, stuck with it. It was what he turned to when he needed focus, hours at a time spent plucking methodically at the same chord, like a musical equivalent of a mantra. 

He focused on the worn wood that had been caressed so many times, the long parallel strings that brought order into chaos. Slowly, with a few final war cries, the nightmare dissolved. In the silence that followed, Mamoru wished that he could also erase the memories that had created it, and though that was an ethical boundary that he had decided long ego never to cross, it did not mean he did not briefly consider it. 

He felt Jaden's hand loosen its grip beneath his, and with a small squeeze, he guided it down to rest on his pillow. Four crescent marks were left embedded in his arm where even Jaden's well-bitten nails had managed to reach, and these, too, Mamoru erased with a touch of his fingers.

He was still scrutinizing his handiwork with the now-healed cuts, when he happened to glance back at Jaden's face and see two glistening, wide open eyes staring straight back at his.

Mamoru jumped back in alarm, forgetting completely about the dangerous layout of the room behind him, until his heel caught the bike wheel and sent him stumbling right on top of the model airplane. With a delicate "crunch" and a blinding pain shooting up his leg, Mamoru found himself with an authentic replica of a B-26 Marauder plane crash beneath his foot. He immediately turned to blurt apologies to the blond man on the bed, but was stunned to find that though his eyes were still on Mamoru, Jaden had not moved. He would have expected a bit more swearing from him over the incident.

"...Jaden?" He prompted carefully, although his foot was still screaming bloody murder.

"Should'a never gotten on that horse," the blond man informed him in a foggy mumble.

"...Okay," Mamoru answered. He was not entirely sure that Jaden had ever been within a meter of a horse in his life. In this life, anyway.

"She told me not to," he babbled on, his eyes decidedly glazed over. 

"I'm... sorry to hear that, buddy."

"Imma shoot that horse," he mumbled authoritatively, burying his face in his arm. He continued to mumble long after his mouth had ceased to form coherent words, and it was under the cover of this sound that Mamoru hobbled back through the deadly junk pile as silently as he could manage.

He stood on one leg to close the door, after which he sank down against the wall and removed the tiny, hand-painted B-26 propeller from the sole of his foot. The Earth Prince leaned his head back against the wall and took stock. He was alone, in a dark hallway, awake when he should have been asleep, and trying to forget the sound of the screaming in his guardian's nightmare, a sound that the silence simply refused to drown out. His foot hurt, his head was starting to ache, and he rubbed at his arms, wishing he had bothered to put on a shirt. If he was as intelligent as people sometimes claimed him to be, he would admit defeat right now and return to his perfectly warm and safe bed. Nobody would ever know the difference except himself.

But behind the door across from him, he could still feel the dark twist of another nightmare, and he could not, in good conscience, leave it to feed on one of his brothers while he went back to sleep. He had set out to accomplish something, here, and there was no going back now.

Mamoru stood, squaring his bare shoulders and shaking off the horrors of Jaden's dream to face a new one. He figured he was becoming a bit of an expert at the entering of doors by now, and so it was with an air of cockiness that he approached the one with the oversized poster of a busty cheerleader on it. As before, he gave the door knob a slow, careful turn.

Contrary to the usual behavior of door knobs, it did not budge. Frowning, he twisted the other way. Nothing. He tried a third time, a little more forcefully, but force of will was not going to make that sucker move. 

Silently, Mamoru called down every curse of Heaven and Earth and Chaos himself on Neil. What gave that man the right to go locking his door in the middle of the night, anyway? Who was he to deny his prince the ability to sneak undetected into his bedroom whenever he wished to?

He stood back and glared at the offending door knob. He could break it down. He almost wanted to. But that probably interfered with that cautious silence he had worked so hard to maintain. He gave a weary sigh. He had said he would look to his Tuxedo Kamen jewel thief days for this mission. He just did not expect to be doing that in a literal sense. He turned and stalked back to his own room.

He could have taken that opportunity to finally grab himself a shirt, but Mamoru was now so intent on his goal that he moved right past the closet and to the window. There was a good reason why he made sure that the screens were removed from every window in the house.

A frosty chill brushed over his skin when he slid the window open, and the crisp winter air tasted sweet on his tongue. He braced his hands on either side of the window, and in the time that it took him to lift one long leg, the foot that came to rest on the sill had been armored in a polished black shoe, and his hands were gloved in white. Tuxedo Kamen pulled himself easily up through the window, and with one swift, catlike leap, perched soundlessly on the roof.

The street below glowed brightly in the street lights, a thin veil of frost glistening up at him from the pavement. Many people would likely be concerned at this point, but for Tuxedo Kamen, rooftops were easy. He could dance the tango on a rooftop. Rooftops were his bitch. Despite the chill wind and his distance from safe ground, he crossed the rooftop as easily as he would the inside of his house, and soon he was latched one-armed, all Spiderman-style, to the eaves, his feet on the wall, his cape flaring dramatically, and his other hand forcing entry through Neil's window. 

When it was open, he slipped easily from his position onto the windowsill, and from there it was simply a silent drop to the floor, his feet already bare again before they soundlessly hit the wood. He could hear the heavy breaths of the strong, athletic guardian, and as Mamoru's eyes adjusted to the darkness, he checked his senses to make sure that Neil was still asleep. 

When his vision had adjusted enough to show that the floor was not quite so treacherous as Jaden's (Neil was hardly clean either, but he liked to stack things in corners or shove them under his bed like a 12-year old, and his desk had not been a functional working space for a year), he started towards the bed.

And then Mamoru froze in his tracks, because he realized at that moment, with slowly-dawning horror, why Neil locked his door.

His guardian was sprawled on his back, one arm flung up over his head and woven among his long dark hair. He took up almost the entirety of the queen-sized bed with his limbs splayed as they were, every inch of him the fierce and ancient warrior that legend held him as. And every inch of him as naked and exposed as a jaybird.

Where are your clothes? Mamoru wanted to shout, but because waking Neil to have him find his prince there, in his room, witnessing his most compromising position, was as desirable as having his leg slowly chewed off by Hotaru's new pet shih tzu, he simply shouted in his head, as loud as his mental volume could go. And why are you wearing socks? He saw now that Neil's feet were inexplicably socked, and he recognized them as a pair that Sasha had bought him for his birthday. They were purple, with wide mouths stitched over the toes, filled with jagged little teeth. The wild eyes gazing out from each of Neil's ankles spoke of deadly murder, and it was no wonder Neil was having nightmares, with such terrifying creatures appearing to be munching on his feet.

The Prince of Earth stood frozen in place by 200 pounds of nude Shitennou flesh. It was not the bareness itself that bothered him, so much as the idea of explaining to Neil why he himself was standing here, shirtless, in the dead of night. In fact, the shirtless factor made him briefly consider transforming back into Tuxedo Kamen, but the thought of standing over his naked guardian in a mask and cape sounded downright fetishistic. He even considered throwing a sheet or something over Neil, but alas, his guardian apparently deemed bedding to be something for sleeping over instead of under, and every available blanket and sheet was beneath his stark naked body.

Mamoru considered abandoning ship right then and there. Some lion's dens you simply did not go strolling into, especially the dens of lions who slept in nothing but purple monster socks. Neil himself would probably agree with him on this, if he were awake to offer his opinion, that it was better to back away slowly and let him deal with his own demons.

He turned back to the window. He could head back over the house, then through his room, check on Kain (who would hopefully be clothed), and call it a night. And tomorrow, he could take Sasha aside and tell him to invest in a pair of boxers for Neil's Christmas gift instead of socks. He'd help Neil the next time around, when he was sure that the guardian was clothed in a little more than his birthday suit.

He was scrambling back up onto the window, when a low, animal sound made the base of his stomach clench. It was a sound so feral and inhuman that he was already in a defensive stance, scanning the room frantically for wild beasts, before he identified the source of the noise. It was some terrible hybrid of a growl and a whimper, and it was coming from the bed.

He hesitated only a moment before returning to the window, only to slide it most of the way shut (though he could not help leaving it open a crack, in the faint hope of easy escape). He rushed silently to Neil's bedside, all thoughts of abandonment suddenly gone from his mind. 

His guardian showed little outward sign of the dream that tortured him. In the brief scan (very brief) over his sleeping form, he seemed to be laying in perfect relaxation, even despite the dark bruises blooming over his left shoulder and down the length of his collarbone. His arms flung over his head, his head tilted back, just the same as any nude colonist with a sock fetish reclining in the sunshine. Even the faint shadow of stubble spreading over his chin completed the picture of casual composure. Except for the way that his neck muscles tensed, his pulse visibly drumming in his throat. And the way that sometimes, his lips curled up in a terrible snarl.

I'll make you a deal, he silently told the sleeping form. I won't tell anyone, if you won't.

He took Neil's silence as affirmation, and so, carefully facing away from certain nether regions, he reached for the northernmost point of the brunette man, which happened to be the hand that was half-buried in a tangle of brown curls. 

Mamoru did not do well around animals. He had never grown up with the proverbial family dog, never kept so much as a fish in his apartment. Cats made him nervous, unless they were of the talking sort, birds had a creepy look about them, the squirrels at the park made him think only of disease, and anything bigger within city limits belonged safely within neatly-kept pens where they could do nothing unpredictable like sniff his leg or eat his face off. He had grown up in one of the largest cities in the world, and never seen so much as a cow at close range.

So when the very first sensation that Neil emitted was a deep, ground-shaking, bone-rattling growl, Mamoru took the most sensible course of action imaginable, which was to snatch his hand back and spin wildly around to check again for ferocious creatures. Maybe Hotaru's pet shih tzu had finally turned rabid and come to hunt him down. But the room remained still and empty, still silent except for his own panicked breathing and the faint drumming of his heart.

He cursed himself for finally losing his nerve. No other nightmare had been allowed to conquer him yet, so how could he let this one bother him?

Gritting his teeth, he slid his fingers through the chestnut waves of hair and took hold of Neil's hand again, squeezing tighter this time, in as much a sign to himself as to Neil that he had no intention of letting go. 

Unfortunately, only a moment later, neither did Neil. His hand clamped down around Mamoru's with all the force of a bear trap, nearly crushing his fingers. That was when the growls turned louder, closer, barely inches from his ear. He gasped, tried to pull back, but just as Neil's hand had trapped him, so did he feel the nightmare begin to close around him, more vividly and terrifyingly than any of the others. As though sensing the tiny ball of fear rising in Mamoru's gut, the dream sank his teeth deep into his consciousness, and the fact that he was presently awake did not dull the sensation that he was being hunted.

Why, he thought dimly, did all of his Shitennou have such strong ideas about what blood tasted like? Were they engaging in vampirism when he was not looking? That was what he tasted, that metallic flavor so hot and vile in his mouth that he nearly choked with it. The growls and snarls flooded his ears, and every hair on the back of his neck rose as he felt hot breath shudder across it. 

Against every screaming nerve in his body telling him not to turn around, he forced himself to do just that, tethered though he was to a bare-ass sleeping guardian. The fact that only vacant darkness remained behind him did nothing to settle his anxiety; that just meant that the beast was somewhere he could not see. He dropped to the floor, pushing his back against the bed where nothing could sneak up on him, and forced himself to steady his breathing. 

Another growl sounded, this time to his left. Mamoru cringed despite himself, and maybe gripped Neil's hand a little tighter than he should have, but Neil's hand had closed in such a vice-like grip that he could not have noticed. His guardian, so exposed and vulnerable, bared his teeth and reared his head back, as though daring the invisible beast to aim for his jugular. 

Some people dreamed about horrible monsters chasing them. Maybe Neil dreamed that he was the monster.

If Sasha's powers manifested as a phoenix and Jaden was a creature of water, Neil's patron animal would be something with significantly more teeth. The ornamental knife collection he kept on display was not unlike a row of horrible incisors glistening on his wall, as artistic as the delicate curve of the blades were. Metal was unique among the elements, as beautiful and precious as it was deadly. It was mutable as water and stable as mountains, ever adapting and strengthening itself, twisting and molding into every necessary task required of it. It conducted energy with ferocious speed, and, practical though it was, revealed moments of rich beauty. 

That was Neil. Adaptable, but not quite as prone to change as Jaden. Solid and fierce and intense in all that he did. Unexpected, in his study of philosophy and his ability to be unendingly giving. 

The creature snarled in his ear again, and the cold sweat springing on Mamoru's brow had nothing to do with the temperature. He was glad he had not come here first, else he may not have had the presence of mind to figure out what to do next. Doing his best not to look too hard at the naked elephant in the room, he searched frantically for something of Neil's to latch onto. Something to remind him that he was more than the savage creature bearing down on him in the darkness. 

Something glistened in the faint light, and gradually Mamoru recognized the blades of Neil's hockey skates, dangling by their laces from the back of a chair. It always amazed him how Neil could carry his soldier's persona from the battlefield to the ice, and maintain it while skimming over frozen water on nothing but thin slivers of metal. Mamoru's thumb slid over the tip of the long jagged scar that snaked up the length of Neil's forearm, as evidence of the broken wrist he had suffered on the ice. He had offered many times to take care of that scar, but, like the bruises that darkened his chest and thighs, the torn knuckles, the dark ring under his left eye and his split lip, he wore it like a badge of honor. When the Shitennou had returned to find only shame in every battle they fought, Neil had found glory in bruises and honor in broken bones. 

His hand was going numb with pain. Mamoru turned and vaulted himself up on his knees, wrapping his other hand around Neil's. He focused on the well-worn skates, the way they often came off the ice with a thick skin of snow over the blades, the way they often stood sentry in the porch, stinking up the place as often as not with their special brand of funk that came only from hours of hard work and play and pouring out of one's soul. Thankfully, the monstrous nightmare obeyed, and reluctantly, slowly, the growls were silenced. 

Last of all, his hand was released, pinpricks of pain springing all over it as the blood rushed back into his fingers. Mamoru pulled his hand out of Neil's, rubbing at his own neck to erase the sensation of hot breath blowing across it. Neil really was the picture of relaxation now, sighing as his head flopped to one side, stubble scraping noisily against his arm. He lowered his other arm, brought it down to rest on his stomach.

...And immediately began scratching himself, somewhere below the stomach region, with somewhat admirable vigor. 

The social awkwardness alone was enough to chase Mamoru out of Neil's room without any pause to catch his breath. It was not until he was back in his own bedroom, leaning against the closed window, that he was able to run his fingers through his hair and take a steadying breath. He made a decision. No matter how cute they looked, he and Usagi were never, ever going to own a dog.

Feeling thoroughly drained, Mamoru pushed himself upright and resisted the urge to look longingly at his empty bed. Just one more. He just had to get through one more, and then he could sleep. Hopefully forever, and without a single dream in sight.

Kain's door had none of the adornments of the others. Kain was neat and orderly, and only barely tolerated the frivolous decorations that everyone else insisted upon. And, thankfully, he did not lock his door.

The frigid air that struck Mamoru the moment the door swung open made him jump back in shock. It was worse than the chill air outside, worse than any natural winter that Tokyo experienced. It was the kind of cold that made your lungs deflate, that made you fear that breathing too deep would cause the inside of your throat to freeze. The kind of cold that was incomprehensible, that paralyzed your thoughts and made the very idea of warmth unimaginable. 

Mamoru wrapped his arms around himself, squinting through the eyeball-freezing cold into Kain's room as his breath plumed in gentle puffs of steam, but the door opened onto a black abyss, as though the room itself had fallen into a never-ending chasm. He nearly feared that if he stepped from the dimly-lit hall floor, he would pitch right off the edge into nothingness. 

Sasha's self-generated sauna may have been mildly uncomfortable, but this was downright dangerous. He had rarely seen Kain's power so unbridled outside of the battlefield. Mamoru wondered whether he could manage to deal with his head guard's nightmares before he lost all his fingers and toes to frostbite. 

The Earth had many dark places. The deep caverns, the twisting caves, the crushing depths of the sea where neither light nor life could reach, the endless polar winters where ice glistened beneath the dusk of stars and shimmering aurorae. More than anyone, Kain had had to prove himself to the senshi, that darkness was not only a tool of evil, that it had a place among their ranks.

Though nobody had more staunchly defended the head Shitennou than himself, Mamoru thought he could understand a little of the trepidation the girls had felt, as he pulled himself, shivering, against the doorframe, which was already beginning to form a thin icy frost. But fearful though he was, what concerned him more was how bad Kain's dreams would have to get, for him to turn his room into a deep freeze in response. The thought of running to the closet for a coat and maybe the longest scarf he owned briefly crossed his mind, but he could not imagine wasting another second before rushing to Kain's aid. Though he had lost all feeling in his ears and toes, Mamoru took as steadying a breath as he could manage through his trembling, and plunged into the darkness.

The air pressed in on him, as heavy and thick as black Jello. Mamoru tried not to panic as the doorway vanished behind him, as even the sound of his own breathing seemed to vanish into the void. Through the vacant blackness, he could hear a thin, faint sound that reminded him of ice cracking. He stepped forward tentatively, in the direction that he approximated as the bed. His feet were already so numb that he could not feel the floor. If he had stepped on Jaden's plane this time around, he probably would not have noticed. He held his hand before him, groping for the bed or anything like it.

He desperately hoped that Kain was wearing clothes.

It happened too suddenly to comprehend. It was as if the darkness itself had solidified around him, but it was a real hand that his cry was muffled behind as it clamped over his mouth, and no darkness could pin his arm so forcefully behind his back. Mamoru struggled on the verge of panic, his thoughts on his other guardians and what a shame it was that he would have to wake them, after all his hard work, summon them to his side to rescue Kain and himself from this new threat.

"Have I never taught you," said a soft voice in his ear, "that it is incredibly rude to be sneaking uninvited into someone's room in the night?"

Through the adrenaline still drumming in his head, Mamoru felt his panic fade at the sound of Kain's voice. The thick blackness fizzled from his vision, and in the comparatively bright slivers of light reaching between the curtains, he could see the perfectly empty bed before him. The hand over his mouth was warm, as though completely unaffected by the cold it had created, as was the chest his back was pressed against. As his sense of feeling returned, he became aware of the soft tickle of long white hair on his shoulder.

He struggled briefly against his bonds, but he was as ineffective in Kain's grip as a newborn kitten, and his efforts received only a small chuckle. Against his own pride, he ceased struggling, and forced himself to relax, as a sign of his resignation to Kain's clear superiority.

As expected, Kain's grip slackened immediately, code of honor dictating that he back off the moment his opponent had given up. That was Kain, duty-bound and predictable to a fault.

As soon as he was able, Mamoru wrenched his arm out of Kain's grip and landed an elbow in his side. It bought him just enough time to pull away, just enough time to spin around and block the punch aimed for his chest, the force of which still sent him stumbling back. On a good day, he could almost hold his own against Kain. On a good day, he had a sliver of a chance of breaking past his guardian's defense and knocking him to the floor, no sparkly crystal required. This was not one of those days.

His hands came up to block every blow, but his limbs were not responding as fast as he wanted. He could already feel his movements growing sloppy, as Kain slowly backed him into a corner. He swung his arm over his face to block what should have been an easy punch, but it struck harder than he anticipated, throwing him off-balance. As equilibrium failed him and gravity took over, Mamoru realized too late that he was standing right in front of Kain's drum kit, that he was about to be in a lot more pain than a whole pile of Jaden's model airplanes could provide. 

In the breathless second before the dimly glistening instruments rose up to mutually destroy themselves against him, Kain's hand shot out and grabbed Mamoru by the arm, saving him from a very loud and humiliating death via impalement on a cymbal stand. Before he could breathe a word of thanks, a fist slammed into his back just to the right of his spine, throwing him harmlessly, if not painlessly, to the floor.

Mamoru groaned, clutching his payback for the cheap shot he had taken with his elbow. He could see the dim outline of Kain standing over him, patiently waiting to see whether he was going to get back up. Panting, he waved his hand in a vague sentiment of "please don't hurt me again." He had had enough humiliation for one night.

Kain could have helped him up, but instead he stepped right over Mamoru's pathetic form and crossed the room. "You break into my room in the dead of night, and you can't even give me the satisfaction of a decent fight?" He flicked on the ultra modern Ikea lamp that looked like a tall frosted ice cube, though Mamoru did not think he needed it. Kain could see in the dark just fine.

He was still panting, but he managed to pull himself into a sitting position and groan, "I think you bruised my kidneys." 

Kain turned, eying him critically. In the light, Mamoru could see the dark circles under his gunmetal grey eyes, the unkempt silver hair that fell over his broad, bare shoulders. He was belatedly relieved to note that Kain was wearing cotton pajama pants in dark navy blue (Kain never wore anything with printed patterns on it, ever. Anything that was not a solid color seemed to deeply offend him). "You've been exerting yourself," he noted. It was not a question. In the maddening way that he seemed always to Jedi his way into being three steps ahead, Kain just knew. 

Mamoru silently rubbed at his imaginary bruise, knowing that there was no point in denying it. 

His head Shitennou moved to the window and pushed it open, as though it was possible to make the room any colder than it already was. Contrary to Sasha, Kain liked to sleep in near-arctic temperatures, something that was a regular source of conflict between them. He placed his strong hands on the window ledge, leaned out into the lightly-frosted wind. "So what were you doing, sneaking around your own house like a thief?"

Mamoru eyed Kain's bed enviously, as goosebumps prickled over his arms in the cold. He pulled the tail end of a blanket around himself and huddled into it with his back to the bed. "How long have you been awake?"

Kain looked at him. "Long enough, apparently. I would love to know what you were doing on the roof."

The Earth Prince's face dropped into his hands. The night's adventures were beginning to look less triumphant and more ridiculous as he considered how to explain them out loud. "I should have known to come here first."

"You should always know better than to try and get something past me."

"I couldn't sleep," he mumbled into the blanket that he was either trying to burrow into or hide behind, he was not entirely certain which. He knew that was no sort of explanation at all, and sure enough, Kain waited silently for the real one. Mamoru took a breath and looked up at him. "I couldn't sleep because of all the nightmares everyone was having." He thought he saw Kain's jaw stiffen a little. "I just wanted to... I don't know." He dropped his head back into his slowly-forming cocoon, letting his voice be muffled behind it. "I just wanted to help."

The silence stretched out, as Kain leaned into the winter breeze, and Mamoru simply huddled in a tiny ball. The feeling was almost returning to his toes. Maybe Sasha had the right idea, with his blanket forts.

Finally, Kain spoke. "That's a rather frivolous use of the Golden Crystal, don't you think?"

Mamoru looked up at him. "I don't think so."

The leader of the Shitennou regarded him, his eyes the color of turbulent seas. "No, I guess you wouldn't."

Mamoru was left trying to decide whether that was a compliment instead of a criticism. In Kain-speak, it might have been.

"And the roof?"

"Neil, um, locks his door," he muttered, his voice growing quieter with every syllable.

"Because he sleeps in the nude?"

"You're telling me you knew that?"

"You're telling me you didn't?" 

It took Mamoru too long to catch the dry humor in his voice, and he looked up in time to see the mild smirk on Kain's face. "You didn't actually know that, did you?"

"The door-locking was a little suspicious."

Mamoru waited a beat before confessing, "he wears socks."

Kain's eyebrows shot up beneath his silver hair. "Oh. That's... very unfortunate. Were they..."

"On his feet."

"Just checking."

It was nice to laugh after the crush of three nightmares. Nice to talk to someone after a long night on his own. But Mamoru remembered again that it was only the three nightmares he had faced. "I might have been wrong, but when I woke up, I could have sworn there were four nightmares going on, not three."

Kain was still in the lamplight, which was confirmation enough. Mamoru thought, with a small pang of guilt, that he really should have come here first. "Are you okay?"

His guardian looked at him, the shadows still clinging beneath his eyes as though the darkness he had cast before was reluctant to leave its hiding spot. This was not the first time that Mamoru had seen those dark rings forming on Kain's face. "I'm tired," he said simply, the weary note in his voice expressing everything. It was more than this night that weighed on him. 

The apology that he wanted to offer seemed too inadequate to utter, so Mamoru sat in silence, gazing up at the tidy room. Kain was not entirely as clinical as Mamoru in his approach to decor, though he was so orderly that Mamoru could not help but notice the way that even the books on his shelves seemed to line up perfectly. The colors were unobtrusive neutrals, the decorations minimal. That Kain even owned a set of drums, let alone played them, was a surprising contrast to any who did not know him very well.

The other surprising element in the room was an uncommon addition. Kain's desk was currently overtaken by the squat, gnarled form of a Japanese white pine bonsai tree. Normally it was found right outside the front door, greeting visitors like a wrinkled old gatekeeper. It could apparently survive the frost outside just fine, despite its diminutive stature, but Kain sometimes hauled the tiny tree in its wide plastic bowl inside, for pruning or adjusting the soil or whatever he did in those long hours he spent staring at the plant in quiet meditation. 

Mamoru had a memory of Kain staring transfixed at a single cluster of needles for several long minutes, before slowly and deliberately reaching out and snapping off one of them, like a painter adding a final brush stroke. It never ceased to amaze him how Kain could pour his heart into such a tiny life, could have the patience for a work of art that would take years to cultivate, yet had all the demanding fussiness of a small child.

"Come here," he said suddenly, and the startled way that Kain glanced up from the window indicated that he had been as lost in his thoughts as Mamoru.

"Why?" He hung back, suspicious.

Mamoru stood, shaking off the blanket that he had already half-pulled onto the floor. "Just come over here and sit down."

His silver-haired guardian reluctantly complied, if only because Mamoru was his liege and technically allowed to give orders sometimes. 

"Hold still. I want to try something."

"Those are words I never want to hear, in any context."

The Earth Prince laughed as he sat down behind his guardian, and wrapped his arms around his neck. "Trust me," he whispered, and his confidence came only from the knowledge that Kain already did.

Maybe he could not go back in time and make Kain's nightmare stop before he had to wake up with the knowledge of it. Maybe he could not stop the memories that had created it to begin with, or better yet, go back as many centuries as it took to make it so the events of the past had never happened. And maybe it would be a long time before he could really erase the shadows from beneath his guardian's eyes. 

But here, on this night, there were still the lingering effects of a nightmare that had followed its host into the waking world, and maybe that host was fully conscious and a little skeptical, but he was going to eliminate this final nightmare, and finally, finally, bring the last of his brothers some much-needed rest.

There were only snatches of the dream remaining, but they were strong enough to knock the wind from him. Shadows of fear and loneliness that clutched so tight that they physically hurt. Mamoru had already chosen the bonsai to latch onto, the stillness and the steadiness of it in the midst of half-remembered chaos, and gradually, more slowly than any of the others, Kain relinquished the final shreds of his nightmare, and his shoulders sank as the tension released from them.

"What did you do?"

"The only thing that I could." Mamoru yawned as he sat back, the exhaustion of his final task weighing on him. He fumbled for the blankets again, as a faint breeze from the window reminded him that he was still without a shirt.

"I still think this is a frivolous waste of your powers. You're going to regret it tomorrow."

Mamoru burrowed as deep under the covers as he could get. "Believe what you want, but you're still nightmare free for tonight."

Kain was silent for a few moments. "Well, thank you."

When he received no response, he turned to his prince, only to find him hunkered down like a burrito beneath the blankets, only a few rumpled locks of black hair visible. "...This is my bed," he informed him.

An indiscernible mumble was his only reply, followed by the distinct silence of someone who had departed from the conscious world. Kain stifled a sigh, and shoved the exhausted prince, burrito-wrappings and all, to the far side of the bed. He flicked off the ice cube-lamp, and on checking his clock found that they still had a few hours of darkness left in which to catch up on their sleep. He slid his hand over the top of Mamoru's head, because it was the only available part of him, whispering "goodnight, Prince."

Nobody had any more dreams that night.

***

Mamoru woke to shouting, and the feel of a million tiny hammers swinging at the inside of his skull. A delightful side-effect of using the Golden Crystal was that it sometimes made him feel exactly the way that a hangover did. It was as though someone had smashed the crystal into a billion tiny shimmering pieces and jammed every one of those little shards into his brain. He peeled his eyelids back, and promptly wished that he had not. He opened his mouth to groan, and found his tongue was glued to the roof of his mouth.

He laid in abject pain for a few minutes, but the drumming of his head was not going to let him get back to sleep just yet, and he could have sworn he just heard something smash in the living room. Slowly, he pried himself loose from the tangle of bedding that he had wound around himself in the night, and stumbled out of Kain's bed. 

The blur of pounding, cackling, blond glee that roared by him in the hall was either Jaden or Sasha, his eyes were too bleary to tell just yet, and by default that meant that the next one who streamed by him was the other one. He stumbled into the kitchen as one tackled the other to the ground, where Kain was drinking coffee and reading the news on his laptop, apparently too disinterested to notice or care. They had both been shouting seemingly arbitrary strings of insults at each other until that point, but now he heard Sasha shout, "I didn't break your fucking toy, you little girl. Maybe you shouldn't leave them lying everywhere."

"Well somebody did," Jaden asserted. "How else did it get so crushed up? And one of the propellers made it all the way into the fucking hall."

"Jaden," Kain said reasonably, without glancing up from his screen, "are you suggesting that somebody snuck into your room in the middle of the night, just to smash your model airplane?"

Jaden turned an interesting shade of fuschia. "Well, no, but..."

"Then obviously," Kain said, with all the patience of a parent, "Sasha could not have had anything to do with it."

The matter quickly resolved itself after that, once some obligatory noogies had been exchanged, and soon they were pouring themselves coffee like normal human beings and discussing what to do on a winter Sunday that should probably be spent studying but likely would not be. Mamoru sank into a chair while conversation floated overhead, his head too disengaged from the rest of his body to concentrate on much other than sitting upright.

"Where's Neil?"

"Practicing with his hockey buddies, probably getting his face smashed in."

"Know what we need to do, we need to get outside. Fuck indoors. Let's go start a snowball fight."

"Yes, with all that snow you see outside."

"Let's go start a frostball fight."

It was right around this point that Mamoru discovered his chin was nearly on the table. He pushed himself to his feet, with some effort, and stumbled vaguely in the direction of his room.

"Hey Mamoru, where're you going? You're still coming to shoot hoops later, right? We gotta maintain the even numbers."

Mamoru kept stumble-shuffling towards his room, muttering "'m going back to bed." 

Jaden's voice trailed him down the hall. "You look like a zombie, man. You gotta learn to relax a little. Stop stressing so much."

He made it to the end of his hall and only stumbled once on his way into his bedroom. Through the closed door, he could hear Jaden's "What the hell. What's wrong with him?"

He really wished that Kain had managed to keep the slight flavor of smugness out of his voice as he replied, "I don't know. Bad dreams, maybe?"

**Author's Note:**

> Hi there, thanks for reading! This fanfic became the first in the series that I now affectionately call Monster Socks!, for reasons you may have picked up on in this story. When I wrote this, I deliberately wrote it in such a way as to feel like the characters were already established, to give me the freedom to go back and fill in those blanks later, instead of trying to introduce everything about them here. You think you missed something? You did not. This story can be taken as a one-shot on its own, or you can take a look at the [other stories](http://archiveofourown.org/series/152738) in the series.
> 
> For this reason, the Monster Socks! collection is written out of sequence. Most of them take place before this story. I hope this is not too confusing for you.


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